Review: Year of No Sugar by Eve O. Schaub
Eve O. Schaub watched a YouTube lecture by Robert Lustig about fructose being basically poison, panicked, and then talked her husband and two kids into giving up added sugar for an entire calendar year. Year of No Sugar is the memoir of how that went, which is to say: birthday cakes were a problem.
I went into this expecting to be annoyed and came out mostly charmed. Schaub is self-aware enough to acknowledge that the project is privileged, weird, and occasionally torturous to her family, especially her younger daughter, who just wants a cupcake at school like a normal child. The chapters are short, the tone is conversational, and there’s a real diary-honesty to the moments where the experiment is going badly and Schaub is reading nutrition labels in the supermarket like a hostage.
Where the book gets shaky is the science. Schaub leans heavily on Lustig and on a couple of other anti-sugar voices, and presents the case as more settled than it actually is. I’m sympathetic to “Americans eat too much added sugar,” which is uncontroversial. I’m less sympathetic to “fructose is metabolic poison,” which is contested. A more skeptical writer would have engaged with the counterarguments instead of waving them off in a footnote. If you come to this for nutrition science, you’ll want a chaser.
Come for the family stuff instead. The Halloween chapter alone is worth the price of admission. So is the bit where they go to Italy and Schaub’s resolve melts for gelato in approximately eleven seconds.
Who’s it for? Readers of A.J. Jacobs-style stunt memoirs, anyone curious about sugar without wanting to read an actual nutrition textbook, parents who feel guilty about juice boxes. Not for readers allergic to even mild diet-culture vibes.
Made me think twice about my coffee. Did not make me give up coffee. Reasonable outcome.